She Was Doing Good (Until the Cat Got Her)
by Desdemona Kakalose
Summary: Devi the Homicidal Maniac AU: after Tess escapes the house, she has a... difficult time of it. This October just seems to stretch on and on... and on... and Tess has been seeing things. (Tess/Devi tension)


A side story to _Prettier in Pieces_ : where is Tess while Johnny is making friends at the Soup Kitchen? Takes place just before Chokopopo's sequel fic "Car Troubles"

well...

* * *

A single garnet seed, sweet and then bitter as the flesh pops between her teeth, a single...

Tess is walking in the darkness. It flutters, beating with infinite tiny wings, a living darkness that watches her.

 _What does it feel like to break a bone?_ she asks her father, who is slumped over some documents in the lamplit kitchen. The room is a green tunnel, its edges fading into nothingness, lit only by the green glass above the sink. It goes on and on as she approaches him, unfolding under her feet like the lung of an accordion. She is tired. Every step wracks her body with misery, but she cannot stop until she reaches him—she isn't safe until she reaches the protective halo of his lamplight, his spit and polish uniform boots.

In his profile she can see the record of his long hours, his impatience with her questions. He doesn't look up from his folio. _When you're under stress, you barely feel it_ , he tells her. _It's the adrenaline, it numbs you._

 _But what about when you torture someone?_ she asks him.

In her memory, which is warping and murking like silt agitated in a stream, he turns from his papers and looks at her with his milky unblinking eye, a white glare in the lamplight and it isn't right it isn't right but he gives her the correct weary smile just like he's supposed to and he says, _Theresa, baby, who's been talking to you about that?_

Tess gasps awake in the restraining grip of some unseen monster, its long flat fingers squeezing her wrists and chest—the light is blinding, disorienting—she thrashes, throws her whole weight against it, but it doesn't give. A shriek of rage claws its way out of her throat, her lungs strain against the pressure that wants to pop them. It wants to pop them so that she can't speak anymore, and then it will take her useless mouth and speak from behind her tongue while she wracks herself in silent, silent thrashing.

"Holy shit," a voice a long way away from her says, "she's awake. Menendez, you fucked up the dosage!"

Their rapid fire voices make her brain ache. Everything aches, but only in a distant sort of way, a cold sort of way. The way it has all month. It's this fucking October weather, it's freezing, where is her coat? Didn't she used to have a coat?

She has to get free. The fiend gripping her ribcage will crush her if she doesn't move _now_. Her nails scrabble, all of them different lengths, one of them scraping raggedly as if it is broken but it _can't_ be broken can it, she would feel that. Breaking a nail hurts like a bitch. It must be alright, then. She throws herself against the restraints—

"She's going to snap a bone like that!" someone says, and she thinks _yes_ , yes, I will snap every bone in my body I will break myself like a glow stick if that's what it takes, if that's what it takes to be free, I'll probably be some dumb color like orange too

She can break whatever it takes. In fact, she can even crack her ribcage open and let this cocooned beast pull itself free of her in stringing placental slime, if she will _only_ only consent, come on Tess, please, wouldn't you like to have this weight off your chest at last? Don't you think it would be nice? Don't you think it would be a relief?

"I _won't_ ," she gasps, "no, no nonononoo-"

"Look at this!" someone says, "It's as high as I can go! She's too small, if I give her any more she'll flatline!"

"If you don't, she'll probably dislocate something trying to get out!"

"You do _not_ want her out. Just _look_ at what happened to Larry."

Something squeezes her palm. In the glare of light and crushing panic, the cool pressure is an anchor. Someone is holding her hand. It's been so long since someone real held her hand. Her glare-blinded eyes prickle with wetness, reflexive, confusing.

 _I'm here with you,_ the scratchy, eager voice says, _in the belly of the beast, at the bottom of the well, Tess—tender, lovely Tess, I am always here with you._

A grip closes around her heaving throat. The fingers that move against her skin are waxy and cold, rough with the scratch of seams stitched into knuckles. Red and blue threads tearing and popping, red and blue threads stitched by the darkness of motels and abandoned shacks so like the one she used to know, just the two of them in that house, her insomnia-palsy fingers shaking in the candlelight. A table set for two. Blackened edges sewn down to angry red flesh. Blue fingertips, blue lips.

 _No matter how far you go,_ he says, _I'm only ever a step behind you._

He leans in over her, a shadow against the florescent glare, crow-black and ragged, lean and hungry, his hollow eye a well that goes on and on forever. His grip on her throat creaks like a vice, the tubes inside crackle.

"Did her heartrate just _increase?"_

 _Stay awake with me, Tess. How will you breathe when the tide comes to swallow you, Tess? Stay awake with me._

Her body strains, the trachea is crumpling but she can't move out of his grip, she can't move at all—

The needle slides into her arm. It slides in and she doesn't feel the prick but she does feel the hot viral infection of the venom under her skin, the killing bite of the monster that is crushing her. She screams. Over her, the vulture throws open its long ragged wings and bursts into shadow across the ceiling. The very air seems to rock with his passage. She swallows down hot, painful breaths. The needle slides free, glinting and fat.

She glares blearily down at her twitching hands, the knuckles raw and red. She finds the ragged nail broken on the end of a crushed digit, the whole finger as swollen and black as rotten fruit. No one is holding her hand.

 _When you break the fingers, for example_ , He says, _they feel_ that _immediately._

 _Ding gingdingingngn_

Tess swims into consciousness. There's a dinging, ringing sound, from the mass behind her, but she can't turn and punch it like an alarm clock the way she wants to. Her arms are strapped to the bed.

"Mmph," she says, one eye squinted closed against the throb of her headache. "Wh…"

"That's interesting," a low woman's voice remarks. "Could you feel me here, Tess? Or _was_ it you who felt me…"

Tess's restrained hands jerk and strain for the protection of her necklace. It's rougher now, cooler somehow, but Tess remembers the rise and fall of that cadence the way that she remembers the smell of putrid sweet rot permeating the floorboards, the way that she remembers the creak of footsteps in the ceiling above her.

"Not again," Tess mutters, her throat as raw as if she's been drinking sand, or just screaming a whole lot for a while. The hatred saps her scarce strength, sucks her like a tapeworm.

"You've been following me, haven't you?" Devi says.

"You ate my life," Tess rasps. "You bitch, you ate my _life._ "

The machine stops ringing finally, falling into a sullen quiet above her as she stops wriggling against the straps and draws back into herself, glaring.

Over and over they do this, like the tiny mechanical figures of Gepetto's clocks, on an endless track always just out of reach. When Devi first started coming to her—stalking a life throw into disarray by a month of unexplained absence, bills, eviction, pink slips—it had been all imperious demands and clawing nightmare visions. Terrible and hard, the echo of her jackboots had shaken the foundations of the world. The flash of black leather on the steps, the creak growing louder and louder, Tess's paper-flimsy hands warding—

 _Come back to me,_ the nightmare queen called out, _you're mine, you'll always be mine_ , as the world fell away from the spiraling endless staircase she descended, as the abyss glittered with a hundred thousand insect eyes.

It's been a while since she's seen that one. Lately, she feels like she doesn't even understand her own madness. Devi hesitates, now.

Tess waits for the softening, the inevitable gentling, the awkward but pleading almost-touch. Lately it seems to go this way instead, with her destroyer kneeling in radiant penitence before her, the triumph and the sick taste of ichor in her mouth as Tess reaches down to grasp her queen—the space that unfolds between them, in front of Tess's straining fingers—the phantom taste of her surrender always just out of reach—the well that draws Devi down and down and down until she is only a mournful echo in the depths of her water tomb—

But Devi does not move, or soften. Devi comes into the room.

"You could say I did, probably," she replies.

As the light from the window hits her, it illuminates a hundred tiny, unexpected changes. Her earrings, when she absently brushes back her hair, are human molars, still rusted at the root. Her eyes seem different, the old manic clarity smoothed and deepened into something almost wryly detached.

"Oh," Tess breathes, winded by the understanding. "You're really here. The real you."

"You _definitely_ have my sickness," Devi says. Her lip quirks up in a grim smile. "How do you like it so far?"

Shaken and feeling half as if she'd taken a fist to the sternum, Tess forms a laugh, weak on her lips. "I recently ripped off a guy's jaw and beat him with it. It's… really cut into my social life."

"It does that," Devi agrees. She steps into the room. She isn't radiant now, not the way she was in that blood-soaked gloom—not the way she is in those penitent visions—not the cruel and magnificent goddess or the star-crowned queen of sorrows. She is just Devi, in her jackboots which seem to be recently patched with ductape on one heel, solid and grey in the filtered twilight. There are deep circles under her eyes. Her skin is darker than it used to be.

Seeing her like this now makes it so clear that the nightmare was never her at all, not its thunderous footsteps or its pleading sorrowful eyes. There is some kind of flint in her that the worm could never quite mimic.

"You've been following me," Devi says again. "I saw you once. Through the window."

Tess shudders with the violet of her hair glowing in the molten reflection of a sunset, alight, alight, a halo of fire—

Devi just looks at her. "Did you want to kill me?"

"I don't," Tess says, "I don't remember…"

But she does remember, or at least she remembers the moment of seeing: the blinking railroad light, the sinking sun reflected in the wide window of the restaurant, Devi unmistakable in her silhouette. The glass is already shattered in her memory, a thousand glittering shards suspended in the air like raindrops between them. But she didn't break the glass, did she? She couldn't have, there was a train…

"Why did you come here?" Tess whispers.

There was a train, and then the glass was empty again. Another mirage in a world of insubstantial nightmares.

"I've often thought of you too," Devi says, drifting towards the window in the room. "I used to think of you somewhere else, maybe in Paris, in the springtime. Living a life far away from here, from this clogged garbage disposal of a city. I had hoped—"

Her voice cuts out. She pulls down the blinds with one finger, viewing the world below this hospital room with a narrow judgment.

"I saw Hell," Devi says. "Your boyfriend says hello, by the way. I ripped out his tongue for you but it just kept growing back. _That's_ fucking typical, isn't it. I saw Heaven too, but it gave me the heebie jeebies, all those people sitting around, looking through you. You know how when you go into a library you immediately have the urge to cough really loudly?"

The buzzing and clicking at the edge of Tess's hearing grinds louder, as if it is raising its hackles.

"When the world came back together," Devi says, "nothing was changed except for me. I saw your bodies lying on the ground there—I saw the sunlight—and this ugly world stitched back together for its next black farce. It's Sisyphean, this world, this _living_ , but what can we do? We're compelled to live, to carry on the work."

Her shape against the window is rigid and hunched. Even so she feels bigger than Tess, more solid—Tess is a Faberge person, an egg waiting to crack. The smallness of her own bones exhausts Tess. She sinks into herself, into the hospital bed that holds her tight. An endless static whines in her ear.

Devi turns back to look at her. "When you were mine," she says, "you were always so much yourself. You lit the darkness like a torch. No matter what you saw, or what you heard, you were never afraid of me."

"I'm still not afraid of you," Tess says, bristling.

Devi nods. She turns back to the window, but she relaxes too, just a little. "The world seems so much greyer to me now. Bigger. I'm a ball bearing rattling around in a toolbox," she sighs. "I used to be so much more."

"Your fucking god complex," Tess says, tongue souring with the old anger. "The body count on your _fucking_ god complex."

Devi lets out a laugh, a rusty sound in her throat, and the sound seems to startle her. She sets her hands on the window sill and lowers her head, hacking up her laughter softly. Tess freezes. The sound is so strange and unearthly that it banishes even the faint hissing and clicking of the worm at the back of her head until there is only silence, terrifying fresh silence, and the huffing of Devi's out of practice laughter. Dust drifts from the blinds.

The distant sounds of traffic, an ambulance siren far away—in the wake of that laughter the world is like an empty hallway, clean and echoing with the click of heels. A ball-bearing, Tess thinks, wishing she could hold herself tight against the rattling silence.

"You must hate me," Devi says, at last. "After what's become of you."

Now this is more familiar ground. In all her violent fantasies she has never once forgiven Devi, even as she sweeps her up and holds her tight and rips her open, eating the starlight out of her. It's a wheel of penitence that gives and gives, and sometimes she thinks her nightmare queen _wants_ it, wants the closeness that they can only ever have in the fevered moment of Tess's revenge. It's a touch that rends, an undoing.

"If you think I'm not gonna claw your throat out," Tess manages, "the second I get a hand free, you've got another thing coming. _"_

Devi's voice takes on a wistful edge, as the dark strands of her hair fall around her jaw. "I always hoped the work would outlive me," she says. "But here I am after all, and all my work is rotting away in an evidence room somewhere, with nothing left to show for any of it except how much you loathe me."

"Congratulations!" Tess says, baring her teeth. "All the king's horses and all the king's men can't put Tess back together again! At least you managed to fuck up _one_ thing badly enough to last! I hope it kills me, you psycho bitch, I hope it kills me fast and takes everything you were ever too cold to love with it."

At the word _cold_ , Devi stiffens. The back of her neck is still pale, untouched by the sunlight.

"You're alive," she says. "As long as you're alive, you're still workable. We can try again."

Tess's ears are starting to ring as all her ghosts begin to creep back in with a vengeance, buzzing and clicking, furious at being silenced. "What are you _talking_ about?" she says.

"I'm talking about you," Devi says, turning abruptly to her. "This sickness is destroying you. You don't know how to ride the wave, and in pretty short order the undertow is going to drown you. They let me go once—I don't know why, I don't even know if it will last, but all evidence suggests that I am, in fact, alive. And so are you."

Devi comes across the room, an indigo shadow against the slatted grey twilight. It's not the radiant penitence, the deliciously reduced queen of nightmares, but it is… it is gentled, after all, as much as it can be. There's a kind of proud humility on her stiff shoulders. She stops just beyond the edge of the hospital bed, her hands folded behind her back.

"I can't undo what I am. The things I've seen—the things I know—as fucked up as they are, I can't surrender them. But you," she says, and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, for a second looking as human as anyone Tess has ever known, "you weren't supposed to end up like this. You were supposed to bloom, like a flower from the killing fields."

Devi reaches down. Her nails are bruised. They disappear out of Tess's sight, scraping a fleck of old blood from her hair which hasn't been washed since she arrived, and all at once Tess feels grimy and gross, frantic with misery inside the constriction of her human skin. The line between Devi's brows creases just slightly.

"Everything I did was for the work," Devi says. Her fingers rub together, powdering old blood into nothing. "Only two things I ever kept for myself, and both of them were destroyed by my touch. I know better now than to hope for company in my damnation. I was your undoing once. Let me put you back together."

Everything buzzes with new angry static, the machines, the walls, even the dark itself. The shadows of the room surge in volume, scraping Tess's eardrums, until they coalesce into the growl of His voice all around her.

 _nnnNNNO!_ He howls, his black shadows beating themselves against the light in a thousand frantic wings, _Violator of flesh! Putrescent witch!_

"It's selfish of me," Devi says, grimly self-mocking, "All that's left of me is what I've become, and that's not much. But I'd like it if you could think of me without being driven to fits of skin-shredding rage."

As the lights flicker violently overhead, Devi looks up. Her gaze narrows.

"Have you let it out yet?" she says.

"No," Tess whispers. "I won't—I can't—"

"They're weaker on the outside, in a way," Devi says. "My sickness was premature, you know. Fragile. This one is fucking fat and strong by now, I bet, but if it's still inside you—"

 _No! No no no!_ he screams, shaking the edges of Tess's vision. His flurried beating wings swirl and lunge into the rough shape of a human, ragged with blue and red stitches, his one eye a rolling, wild circle of white porcelain in his jittering mass.

"What is _that_ supposed to mean?" Tess says. Her eyes are fixed on the shape behind Devi, afraid to look away.

Devi rolls up her sleeves. "Do you know how they remove guinea worms?"

As Tess shakes her head, the swarm swells and thrashes. It is screaming in her ear, clawing at the restraints on her wrists, it wants her to break free and bury the IV in Devi's throat so that the air dribbles from her blue lungs and chokes her, it hates her, it hates her, she did this to us Tess _she did this_

Devi reaches down and takes Tess's face in her hands. It is the first time since the assault and abduction that Devi has ever touched her, and her fingers are somehow startlingly delicate. Tess's heart beats fast.

Red sores like papercuts open all up and down Devi's fingers, splitting the knuckles, the clawing of a thousand tiny edges. _She can't take me away from you,_ the swarm cries, as the machines blink and rattle all around Tess's head. _Tess you won't let her take me, will you—not after you stitched me back together, Tess, with your own two hands—entreat me not to leave thee, wither thou goest I shall_

Devi ignores the tears in her skin, deeper and deeper as they slash their way up her arms and into her clothing. "Shh," she says, not entirely ungentle. "It's alright. Sometimes I even miss it."

The wrist restraints shred, breaking apart like so much white paper. Devi pauses, glancing down at Tess's twitching wrists, the grind of bone against tendon painfully visible under the skin. Like an appendage stitched and tied to her foreign body, Tess's shaking hand fumbles for the IV line.

"The madness," Devi says, distantly. "Sometimes I miss that too."

And then, as Tess's fingers close around the needle, Devi bears down against her lips. Her kiss licks the darkness from Tess's throat, splitting her open beneath the radiant terror of everything that is Devi, mad and not-mad, human and inhuman. A thin moan trembles in Tess, drawn up and eaten away without mercy or reprieve.

 _Wither thou goest I shall go—don't let her do this Tess, I won't go, TESS YOU TRECHEROUS FUCKING WRETCH YOU CAN'T LET HER DO THIS_

The room explodes into black fury, a hundred thousand wings as dark as a well, as dark as the abyss, until all that is left is Devi and the void that reels around her, hating her, terrified of her. With her finger, she gently raises Tess's chin, drinking her up with a soft tongue and shiver-warm lips.

She smells of iron and copper, hard as blood, and underneath that—underneath that, something sweet and red, a flesh that cracks with the memory of autumn, a blue sky so stark and chill that Tess's flesh prickles and hardens under her clothes. Her cells rattle. The void throbs.

All the darkness goes screaming into Devi, tearing loose of the corners, in one terrible pull, and then Devi releases her.

Tess gasps for air, chest heaving, as her vision spins. The hospital tubes and strings sway in the clean air, the empty silence like a hallway through which a single pair of heels make their passage. When she wipes at the corner of her mouth, oily with the passage of some monstrous thought, the back of her hand comes back purple with Devi's lipstick.

Devi's eyes are closed, her head rolls slowly, tendons in her throat stretching and hollowing. "There it is," she says. "Got it."

"Why," Tess starts, but every part of her is trembling and she can't finish, she can't think.

She was never afraid, not of the real Devi, the flesh and blood woman, whose body she once stepped over as it lay bleeding out. This was what she felt, something worse than fear: the green irises scorch, as Devi's eyes snap open—radiating power like a nuclear meltdown, she says, "What could I ever make of you, except a flower from a killing field?"

Tess's vision swims, dancing with red and black spots. Under the ink stains, Devi stops at the doorway just long enough to look back. Maybe it's the way her vision is dying, but the shadows at Devi's heels seem to thrash and multiply across the floor. There is a skittering, chittering sound, like rats in the walls.

"Think of me, if you find the time," Devi says. "Even if it's only to hate me, hate me somewhere beautiful."

Tess hears rather than sees the hospital door click close because her world is black like an ink spill and dragging her down into the well, and it may or may not be a dream that she hears a nurse's footsteps outside the hall, a team of them, led by someone who says in a tone of perfect irritation—

"God shitting damn it, she pulled out her IV again!"


End file.
